The Day After Tomorrow

Plot

Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist for the NOAA, drills for ice-core samples in the Larsen Ice Shelf with his colleagues Frank and Jason. A large portion of the ice shelf splits away, but they manage to escape.

At a United Nations conference on global warming in New Delhi, Jack shares his theory that climate change could lead to a new ice age through the disruption of the North Atlantic Current. United States vice president Raymond Becker is dismissive of Jack's research, but Professor Terry Rapson, a Scottish oceanographer, befriends him over their shared concerns.

Tokyo is struck by a giant hailstorm, and astronauts from the International Space Station spot three gigantic superstorms above Canada, Europe, and Siberia. Rapson's team notice severe temperature drops from multiple buoys in the North Atlantic, providing evidence for Jack's theory and that a climate shift may already be occurring. Remnants of a hurricane spawn a destructive tornado outbreak over the L.A. Basin. Three helicopters sent to rescue the British royal family from Balmoral Castle crash in Scotland after they fly through the eye of the European superstorm.

Jack and Rapson's teams build a forecast model that predicts that the climate shift will occur in 6–8 weeks (later revised to 7–10 days). Rapson shares with Jack that siphoned air from the upper troposphere will flash freeze anything caught in the eye of a cyclone with temperatures below −150 degrees Fahrenheit (−101 degrees Celsius), which caused the royal family helicopter crashes by freezing the fuel on board.

In New York City, Jack's son Sam, along with his friends Brian and Laura, participate in an academic decathlon, where they befriend JD. The North American superstorm creates strong winds and rain that flood Manhattan. All transportation halts, stranding the city's population. While helping to rescue two French-speaking tourists, Laura cuts her leg. A massive storm surge inundates the city, forcing Sam's group to seek shelter at the New York Public Library. Sam contacts Jack and his mother Lucy, a pediatrician, through a working payphone. Jack warns Sam of the impending superstorm, urges him to stay inside and warm, promising to rescue him. Rapson and his team succumb to the European storm. Lucy remains in her hospital, caring for bedridden patients, where the authorities eventually rescue them.

Production

Development

The Day After Tomorrow was inspired by Coast to Coast AM talk-radio host Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's book, The Coming Global Superstorm, and Strieber wrote the film's novelization. Emmerich wrote a first draft of the script and showed it to producer Mark Gordon, who had produced Emmerich's film The Patriot. Nachmanoff came in to help with rewrites. On May 1, 2002, Creative Arts Agency held an auction, with a copy of the script being sent to all major studios along with a term sheet indicating a budget of $125 million, including $10 million for Emmerich against 10% of the gross. On May 3, 2002, 20th Century Fox made a distribution deal to make the film by putting it into pre-production straight away with production due to start in fall 2002, although it was believed that the budget could be kept to $100 million.

Filming

The Day After Tomorrow was filmed predominantly in Montreal and Toronto, with some footage also shot in New York City and Chiyoda, Tokyo. Filming ran from November 7, 2002, until October 18, 2003.

Visual effects

The Day After Tomorrow features 416 visual effects shots, with nine effects houses, notably Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and Digital Domain, and over 1,000 artists, working on the film for over a year.

Although a miniature set was initially considered according to the behind-the-scenes documentary, for the destruction of New York, effects artists instead utilized a 13-block-sized, LIDAR-scanned 3D model of Manhattan, with over 50,000 scanned photographs used for building textures. Due to its overall complexity and a tight schedule, the storm surge scene required as many as three special effects vendors for certain shots, with the digital water created by either Digital Domain or small effects house Tweak Films, depending on the shot. Miniatures were employed for a later underwater scene in which a city bus is crushed under the bulbous bow of an abandoned Russian tanker ship that had drifted inland.

Similarly, the opening flyover of Antarctica was also CGI, created by digitally scanning miniature iceberg models created out of sculpted styrofoam; the falling pieces of ice as the shelf cracks were entirely hand-animated. Running for approximately two and a half minutes in length, the scene was at the time the longest continuous all-CGI shot in film history, surpassing the space zoom-out from the opening of Contact (1997).

Music

Soundtrack

The film's score was composed by Harald Kloser as his first collaboration with director Roland Emmerich. The Japanese dub has an exclusive theme song called "More Than a Million Miles" by a band coincidentally called Day After Tomorrow. The soundtrack of the film was released by Fox Music and Varèse Sarabande on May 18, 2004.

Release

The film had its world premiere in Mexico City on May 17, 2004. It was released to theaters in the United States on May 28, 2004.

Home media

The film was released on VHS and DVD by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment on October 12, 2004, and was released in high-definition video on Blu-ray in North America on October 2, 2007, and in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2008, in 1080p with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track and few bonus features. DVD sales were $110 million, bringing the film's gross to $652,771,772. It became available to stream on Disney+ in 2022 in an effort to show mature-themed films, just three years after the film's distributor made its purchase from Disney by Rupert Murdoch himself.

Reception

Box office

The film came in second at the US box office behind Shrek 2 over its four-day Memorial Day opening and grossed $85,807,341. It led the per-theater average, with a four-day average of $25,053 (compared to Shrek 2's four-day average of $22,633). At the end of its theatrical run, the film had grossed $186,740,799 domestically and $552,639,571 worldwide.

For twenty years, it would hold the record for having the highest opening weekend for a natural disaster film until 2024 when it was dethroned by Twisters. Also for twenty-two years, it was the highest grossing film for a domestic release to never open at number one on opening weekend until it was surpassed by Obsession. Finally in general, it was the highest opening-weekend film to not to lead at the box office until 2015's Inside Out.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, 46% of 219 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The Day After Tomorrow is a ludicrous popcorn thriller filled with clunky dialogue, but spectacular visuals save it from being a total disaster." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "profoundly silly", but nonetheless said the film was effective and praised the special effects. He gave it three stars out of four. Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wrote a completely negative review which considered the film unworthy of publicity for the climate change debate it had created.

Political and scientific criticism

Emmerich did not deny that his casting of a weak president and the resemblance of Kenneth Welsh to Vice President Dick Cheney were intended to criticize the climate change policy of the George W. Bush administration. Responding to claims of insensitivity in his inclusion of scenes of a devastated New York City less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Emmerich said that it was necessary to showcase the increased unity of people in the face of disaster because of the attacks.

Some scientists criticized the film's scientific aspects. Paleoclimatologist and professor of earth and planetary science at Harvard University Daniel P. Schrag said, "On the one hand, I'm glad that there's a big-budget movie about something as critical as climate change. On the other, I'm concerned that people will see these over-the-top effects and think the whole thing is a joke ... We are indeed experimenting with the Earth in a way that hasn't been done for millions of years. But you're not going to see another ice age – at least not like that." J. Marshall Shepherd, a research meteorologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, expressed a similar sentiment: "I'm heartened that there's a movie addressing real climate issues. But as for the science of the movie, I'd give it a D minus or an F. And I'd be concerned if the movie was made to advance a political agenda." According to University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, "It's The Towering Inferno of climate science movies, but I'm not losing any sleep over a new ice age, because it's impossible."

Patrick J. Michaels, a former research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, fellow at the Cato Institute and expert witness for Western Fuels Association who rejected the scientific consensus on global warming, called the film "propaganda" in a USA Today editorial: "As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as 'science' are used to influence political discourse." College instructor and retired NASA Office of Inspector General senior special agent with no academic titles in the field Joseph Gutheinz called The Day After Tomorrow "a cheap thrill ride, which many weak-minded people will jump on and stay on for the rest of their lives" in a Space Daily editorial.

Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an expert on thermohaline circulation and its effect on climate, said after a talk with scriptwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff at the film's Berlin preview:

Potential sequel

In July 2024, Emmerich revealed that a script for a planned "spiritual sequel", titled Exodus, was being worked on. However, nothing has been updated as of September 2026.